Fight Like A Gal
Magnificent Warriors
aka Dynamite Fighters
aka Zhong hua zhan shi
Hong Kong 1987
Directed by David Chung
D & B Films
Eureka Blu Ray Zone B
I’ve been quite taken with Michelle Yeoh, since seeing her at the cinema in 1997 as the new ‘Bond girl’ opposite Pierce Brosnan in Tomorrow Never Dies (reviewed here). I was aware even then that she was probably not used to letting other people perform her stunts, which she would have sorted out herself in many of these early Hong Kong movies but, as I watched her career with interest (and congratulations to her for winning the Oscar for Everything, Everywhere, All At Once - reviewed by me here), I’d never seen any of those pre-Bond roles. However, between them, British boutique labels such as Arrow Films, 88 Films and, in this case, Eureka Master of Cinema, have finally cottoned on that kung fu films will sell by the bucket load to English audiences, who have hitherto had to pursue bootleg recordings of a lot of these titles. Now, I had no idea which Michelle Yeoh movie I wanted to see first from her early career but then I saw a trailer for this release and realised, yeah, Magnificent Warriors was probably the one.
So, this is set in the 1930s and, I think it would be true that the influence of the then recent US blockbuster movies Raiders Of The Lost Ark and Indiana Jones And The Temple Of Doom are very much in evidence here. Michelle Yeoh had not made more than a handful of movies before this and not necessarily action based ones either, but here her training as a dancer and willingness to work hard pays off as she is, front and centre, the main protagonist of this one. Although she’s not an archeologist but a pilot in this. One might say she’s an anti-heroine because she’s also a gun runner, carrying arms in her biplane but, one has to take into account that the film is set historically during the Japanese invasion/occupation of China... so she is very much a resistance fighter, in some ways, to help stop her people being repressed.
And it’s the look and feel of her character which mostly distills the spirit of Indiana Jones more than anything else... as the film is obviously also influenced by various Hong Kong and Hollywood films before those, which also would have fed into the Spielberg films as much as they do here. So Yeoh’s character Ming-Ming wears the leather jacket and uses her bullwhip in ways much more interesting than her American visual counterpart. She really kicks backside in this movie and is especially good with a weapon which, being as ignorant in the art and instruments of war as I am, I can only describe as a pointy, dagger thing on a rope. Certainly, these must have been really intensive shoots (scheduled to their main locations for three weeks but actually taking three months, by all accounts) and the cast must have been left bruised and bloody after each day’s filming. When I watched the sequence where she was flicking the rope all around and spinning it over her head etc, it put me in mind of the same moves used by the Go Go Yubari character in Quentin Tarantino’s Kill Bill Volume One. Not saying he got that from here, by the way, I’m sure this choreography is not unique... just drawing the similarity to more widely seen films to aid the brevity of what kind of fighting moves you can see on display here.
And yeah, it’s a rip roaring movie with some good chemistry between all the lead protagonists such as Richard Ng, Tung-Shing Yee and Chindy Lau. There’s lots of humour thrown into the mix too, as Ming-Ming is tasked with rescuing a stranded secret agent who is, in turn, tasked with stopping the Japanese troops from taking over a village community and using the main building as a factory to manufacture their new poisonous gas... there’s even a scene which is reminiscent (or vice versa) of the ‘testing the gas’ scene in Patty Jenkin’s Wonder Woman movie (reviewed here).
Combine the humour and acting chops with a plot filled to the brim with action and not much room for anything else and, well, you’re definitely onto a winner with this particular audience member. I would have to say that the film’s main weakness might be that the action scenes don’t feel like they lead to a satisfying climax. There’s a long battle scene at the end which pitches the Japanese forces against the Chinese villagers defending their city and it’s certainly fine and explosive enough... but I felt the more interesting action sequences were the ones in the first half of the film, which concentrated on hand to hand combat. So, yeah, it felt a little anticlimactic to me. I was also... and this is no fault of the film... a little disappointed with the liner notes in the accompanying booklet (I should have perhaps waited for a cheaper reissue without the booklet and slipcase, I think). For example, the listing on the back makes great play of it having its original theatrical ending, not seen on home video before. But, there’s nowhere in the packaging that tells you what the difference was, where that ending starts from and why it was cut out. Absolutely no idea. It might be mentioned on one of the two commentary tracks on the disc but, yeah, I rarely have time to do the commentary tracks these days, it has to be said.
Anyway, it’s still a cracking little movie and the print and transfer on this are pretty good. I’ve not seen Magnificent Warriors before but I’ve no doubt this is probably the best way to see it. I really enjoyed this one and might look at seeing what other early Michelle Yeoh films I can get hold of at some point*.
*The writing of this review pre-dates my viewing of Yes, Madam (reviewed here) but I wanted to put this current batch of Hong Kong reviews into some kind of chronological order.
